TEACHING THE POLICE TO PROGRAM: BUILDING A SIMPLE IDE TO TEACH SHELL SCRIPTING AND REDUCE SYNTAX ERRORS

This paper looks at the design and development of a course titled “Forensic Scripting Using Bash”. The course is a collaborative effort by academics, computing industry professionals, and law enforcement officials, with funding provided by the European Commission’s ISEC Project [1] and several of the partner institutions. The aim of this course is to take law enforcement students with no programming experience, and bring them all to a common level of knowledge and understanding of scripting for forensic computing applications in a Linux environment. This paper examines the design and development of this course which is due to run in pilot form between the 3rd and 7th May 2010 hosted by Cybex [2] in Madrid, Spain. This will include: an explanation of how and why this development grew out of the Agis Project [3] “Linux as a Forensic Tool” course; a critical evaluation of the design and development process; an examination of why we think teaching police officers to program is a good idea; and a preview of the course content and suggested evaluation process. Part of the course content includes the production of a shell script that helps students to write programs. It is hoped that this script will not only be a good way of helping students to learn to program using Bash but also cut down on the number of syntax errors received by students.

References:
[1] European Commission (2008) Prevention of and Fight against Crime [online]. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/funding/isec/funding_isec_en.htm [Last accessed 30 November 2009].

[2] Cybex (2009) Fraud Prevention, Detection and Investigation in virtual environments [online]. Available at: http://www.cybex.es/defaulten.aspx [Last accessed 30 November 2009].

[3] European Commission (2006) AGIS was a framework programme to help police, the judiciary and professionals from the EU Member States and candidate countries co-operate in criminal matters and in the fight against crime [online]. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/funding/2004_2007/agis/funding_agis_en.htm [Last accessed 30 November 2009].